Philippines gets economic upgrade, yet many Filipinos feel it’s no ‘big deal’
The country’s leap to upper-middle-income status means little to inflation-squeezed families struggling with debt and meagre wages
Manila resident Ann Michelle Federez-Abato, 35, said her entire salary goes towards her parents’ mortgage, while she and her two-year-old daughter subsist on a monthly remittance of 20,000 pesos (US$324) from her husband, who works abroad as a production officer at a factory.
Much of the public high-school teacher’s money is spent on bills, utilities, groceries and transport, a situation she described as “not really financially comforting, but more of surviving” in Metro Manila – especially with electricity costs up 10 per cent and national inflation at 6.4 per cent.
“I laughed actually. Like, for real? Where did the data come from?” Federez-Abato said of the July 1 announcement that her country’s gross national income (GNI) per capita had reached US$4,850 in 2025, surpassing the US$4,636 cut-off for upper-middle-income economies.
“Filipinos are already at a huge loss with inflation, coupled with their daily expenses and with many sinking further into debt just to get by,” she said, reflecting on a milestone that took nearly 40 years to reach and does not match the nation’s economic reality.
For Hans Bautista, executive director of Inklusibo, a non-profit research centre advocating for the country’s impoverished sector, the World Bank’s upgrade “should not be considered a big deal” when millions of Filipinos are still struggling with “meagre wages, attacks on livelihoods and inaccessible basic necessities”.